[-empyre-] Re: 2 wr[b]yte : oulipo : non-antropocentric culture

["Friedrich W. Block" <block@brueckner-kuehner.de>]

Giselle and Jim: I like the direction of your differentiations - overlapping
of differences. this is more a time-spaced ('multi-modal'?) model of
development than the linear one of what has been called "avant-garde".

We should keep in mind that digital writing in the arts has - at least - a
history of 46 years, starting with the experiments of the Stuttgart group
around Max Bense on the ZUSE Z 22. Think of the role that code and text
processing (including networked texts) played, e.g., in France beginning
with the first Oulipo manifesto (1962), being continued by the "writers and
computers conference" in the Centre George Pompidou (1977), the foundation
of the ALAMO group by Fournel and Roubaud in 1981, a group that concentrated
exclusively on digital writing, the minitel-networked project curated by
Lyotard for the Les Immatériaux exhibition, the foundation of the LAIRE
group in 1988 (with Jean P Balpe being a a bridge from ALAMO), which is
still very active. Just to draw one line which is linked with others.

Another point I want to make:

Giselle, you wrote:
> 1) Programming languages could be a relevant pattern of a
> non-atropocentric culture. A new cultural background where we will
> exchange roles with machines. It means: Machines will be more than
> human extensions...

I want to ask: Which aesthetical and also ethical and political values,
perspectives would you connect to this "non-antropocentric" culture? I mean:
this could again have affinities with a neo-futuristic or a technocentric
attitude. Or - quite different - it could have the direction Bill is
interested in as far as I read him. Here I see a very close focus on the
human and individual mind&body ('thoughtbody'), and this could also be read
in terms of an aesthetic program of "understanding of understanding" as
projected by Oswald Wiener for a "poetics in the age of scientific theories
of knowledge".

Programming languages and self-executing code (syntactically and
semantically simplistic in their way) are a challenge in so far as they can
be confronted with poetic manipulation, interfered with "natural" or poetic
language, reflected upon in their relation to processes in mind and
communication.

Best

Friedrich 


Am 15.10.2005 15:10 Uhr schrieb "Jim Andrews" unter <jim@vispo.com>:

> interesting: 'old/new' different from 'continuity/rupture'; and 'the
> overlapping of differences that digital media allow'.
> 
> on 'the overlapping of differences [and similarities] that digital media
> allow'...
> yes, the staggering hybridity of not only art (forms),
> but of just about everything amenable to the digital.
> the lettriste isou said (1947)
> "Each poet will integrate everything into Everything."
> and that is a poetical proposition--figurative,
> not literal--but relating things
> is erm fundamental to thought
> (a world view would include
> objects and relations between them).
> included exclusions and excluded inclusions,
> the principal of inclusion/exclusion
> beyond p(aub)=p(a)+p(b)-p(a^b)...
> activity that increases several orders of magnitude,
> however continuous, creates its own ruptures,
> its own 'newness' and unrecognizables.
> 
> and as bill pointed out,
> the need to relate
> concerning little areas
> to other little areas
> is very great
> or they stay little.
> 
> ja
> 
>> Giselle Beiguelman wrote:
>> 
>> <<so your willingness to hazard to speak of the new is very welcome to my
>> eyes.>>
>> 
>> same here!! That´s why I differ DW that relates to concrete in results
>> from DW that relates to concrete in attitude. But, I´m not sure if it
>> is possible to adopt or criticize the discourse of the new without
>> giving some thought to the following:
>> 
>> 1. the concecpt of "new" is somehow reminiscent of the avant-garde
>> guerrila of manifestos and does not fit the overlapping of differences
>> that digital media allow.
>> Avant-garde was about substituting one by the other (one argued to be
>> "old", other argued to be "new"); digital media seems to be about
>> intermigling both and others.
>> For that reason, I´d say that "continuity" and "rupture" is not the
>> same of "old" and "new". Walter Benjamin sustains that the flow of
>> history can be described in terms of "intensity" instead of
>> "chronology". The brazilian philosopher Jeanne Marie Gagnebin explains
>> how this allows "to read Benjamin´s philosophy of history and
>> philosophy of language as a reflection centered in Modernity,
>> carachterized by a profound interwieving of the 'ephemeral' and the
>> 'permament'".
>> 
>> 2. the idea of "novelty" can be an industry device, an strategy of
>> marketing based n the quick substition of an "obsolete" product by its
>> "more modern" version.
> 
> 
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